


Arterial Spray Patterns Long Since Dried

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, POV John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 02:03:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian





	Arterial Spray Patterns Long Since Dried

We aren’t perfect. It’s too hard, too strenuous, too _wrong_.

When my hand indulges in the comfort of yours, your fingers encompass me with warmth and indestructibility; in those moments I am certain we could last forever, travelling at the speed of sound. I savour them in their rarity. You are often flying far too fast already to notice that you’ve left me behind, standing with empty words of simple pleasures just hovering behind my lips. You’ve deemed one palm across another as pointless and irrelevant - to an extent, I agree - but it’s nice to hold you there every so often, to remind you that there is more to everything than frantic dashes down back alleys and arterial spray patterns long since dried.

Sometimes you neglect your case files and turn off your phone in favour of exploring my skin until we fall asleep. Sometimes you demand such menial tasks of me while you lose yourself in the darkest corners of your cranium that I wonder if you even notice my particular presence at all. I make you tea before I go to bed without you. Tea that is untouched the following afternoon, neglected and as cold as the toenail clippings in the freezer. Tea that I wash away before leaving you sprawled on the sofa to walk through regents park; I invite you to join me and when I return - alone - I wonder if you even noticed I’d gone. I wonder if you missed me half as much as I’d been missing you for the past week.

In your rare moments of confusion and vulnerability, I’ll stroke your hair while you lie on my chest and confide to me and the walls of our bedroom. Mostly I will reply softly to the darkness in the hope that I can bring you the light you’re looking for. Occasionally there has been one glandular fever patient too many, one hour of sleep too few, one question too intrusive. Occasionally I leave you alone with your darkness while I seek solace elsewhere until the excruciating red cools to a mildly simmering pink and the guilt begins to seek into my pores. This, I regret.

While you’ll happily surround me in intimacy and adoration for hours, it’s uncommon that your mind will leave us wrapped in a haven of each other and sheets uninterrupted for long. I will have managed to drag you away from your research to re-explore the well known territory of your mouth (you’ll be tracing gentle circles into my side with your thumb), when you will suddenly spring away with a violent epiphany that renders our tenderness inconvenient and forgotten. There was even the memorable occasion where you wriggled away from my frantic hands and sprung from our bed - half dressed - to email a serial adulterer and in your urgency, did not return to my arms for a further three hours. It’s okay, really. To you the cases are merely puzzles waiting to be solved - excitement to intersperse the boredom - but you have saved the lives of an incalculable many and I shouldn’t put my own desires before them. But I do, oh but I do.

We are not perfect, not by a long stretch, but I know I’ll love you completely, unconditionally and forever just the same. I only pray that you will too.


End file.
